The invention presented here concerns a circuit and a method for the adaptive suppression of noise such as may be used in digital hearing aids.
The healthy human sense of hearing makes it possible to concentrate on one discussion partner in an acoustic situation, which is disturbed by noise. Many people wearing a hearing aid, however, suffer from a strongly-reduced speech intelligibility, as soon as, in addition to the desired speech signal, interfering background noise is present.
Many methods for the suppression of interfering background noise have been suggested. They can be split-up into single channel methods, which require only one input signal, and into multi-channel methods, which by means of several acoustic inputs make use of the spatial information in the acoustic signal.
In case of all single channel methods, up until now no relevant improvement of the speech intelligibility could be proven. Solely an improvement of the subjectively perceived signal quality is achieved. In addition, these methods fail in that instance important in practice, in which both the useful—as well as the interfering signals are speech (so-called cocktail party situation). None of the single channel methods is in a position to selectively emphasize an individual speech signal from a mixture.
In case of the multi-channel methods for the suppression of noise, one departs from the assumption, that the acoustic source, from which the useful signal is emitted, is situated in front of the listener, while the interfering noise impinges from other directions. This simple assumption proves successful in practice and accommodates the supporting lip-reading. The multi-channel methods can be further subdivided into fixed systems, which have a fixed predefined directional characteristic, and into adaptive systems, which adapt to the momentary noise situation.
The fixed systems operate either with the use of directional microphones, which have two acoustic inputs and which provide an output signal dependent on the direction of impingement, or with the use of several microphones, the signals of which are further processed electrically. Manual switching under certain circumstances enables the choice between different directional characteristics. Systems of this type are available on the market and are increasingly also being incorporated into hearing aids.
From the adaptive systems under development at the present time one has the hope, that they will optimally suppress interfering noise in dependence of the momentary situation and therefore be superior to the fixed systems. An approach with an adaptive directional microphone was presented in Gary W. Elko and Anh-Tho Nguyen Pong, “A Simple Adaptive First-Order Differential Microphone”, 1995 IEEE ASSP Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, New Paltz, N.Y. In that solution, the shape of the directional characteristic is adjusted in function of the signal by means of an adaptive parameter. As a result of this, an individual signal impinging from the side can be suppressed. Due to the limitation to a single adaptive parameter, the system only works in simple sound situations with a single interfering signal.
Numerous investigations have been carried out using two microphones, each of which is located at one ear. In the case of these so-called adaptive beam formers, the sum—and the difference signal of the two microphones are utilized as input for an adaptive filter. The foundations for this kind of processing were published by L. J. Griffiths and C. W. Jim, “An Alternative Approach to Linearly Constrained Adaptive Beamforming”, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. AP-30 No. 1 pp. 27-34, January 1982. These Griffiths-Jim—beam formers can also operate with more than two microphones. Interfering noises can be successfully suppressed with them. Problems, however, are created by the spatial echoes, which are present in real rooms. In extreme cases this can lead to the situation that, instead of the interfering signals, the useful signal is suppressed or distorted.
In the course of the past years, great progress has been made in the field of so-called blind signal separation. A good compilation of the research results to date can be found in Te-Won Lee, “Independent Component Analysis, Theory and Applications”, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 1998. In it, one departs from an approach, in which M statistically independent source signals are received by N sensors in differing mixing ratios (M and N are natural numbers), whereby the transmission functions from the sources to the sensors are unknown. It is the objective of the blind signal separation to reconstruct the statistically independent source signals from the known sensor signals. This is possible in principle, if the number of sensors N corresponds at least to the number of sources M, i.e., N≧M. A great number of different algorithms have been suggested, whereby most of them are not at all suitable for an efficient processing in real time.
Considered as a sub-group can be those algorithms that, instead of the statistical independence, only call for a non-correlation of the reconstructed source signals. These approaches have been comprehensively investigated by Henrik Sahlin, “Blind Signal Separation by Second Order Statistics”, Chalmers University of Technology Technical Report No. 345, Göteborg, Sweden, 1998.
He was able to prove, that the requirement of uncorrelated output signals is entirely sufficient for acoustic signals. Thus, for example, the minimization of a quadratic cost function consisting of cross-correlation terms can be carried out with a gradient process. In doing so, filter coefficients are changed step-by-step in the direction of the negative gradient. A process of this type is described in Henrik Sahlin and Holger Broman, “Separation of Real World Signals”, Signal Processing vol. 64 No. 1, pp. 103-113, January 1998. There it is utilized for the noise suppression in a mobile telephone.